Devas, Charles Stanton

DEVAS, CHARLES STANTON. - English economist, of the Christian social school, b. at Woodside (Old Windsor) on 26 Aug. 1848, d. in London on 6 Nov. 1906. In 1876 he published a pamphlet entitled Labour and Capital in England from the Catholic point of view (London), and in 1892 his principal work Political Economy (ibid.).

Already in his first pamphlet he reveals the characteristics that distinguish his work as a scholar and publicist, as a contributor to the Dublin Review: a very pronounced reaction against the unnatural separation of economic science from morality, the application of Catholic morality to political and economic questions, concern about the dangers of State socialism against the bold conclusions of the bishop of Nottingham, Edward G. Bagshawe, who in certain famous pastorals, and in speeches to Catholic congresses, had not only accepted the theories of Card. Manning, but had gone even further, formulating a veritable program of State socialism. In the dispute between protectionists and free-traders, he took his stand for a moderate intervention of the State, expressing his thought clearly especially in the introduction to the new edition of J. B. Byles's Sophisms of Free-Trade (London 1903).

Celestino Melzi